P. Parrish - The Little Death

“I found it this morning when I was looking for something to eat,” Mel said. “There’s twelve grand there. All in hundreds.”

“Kent said he didn’t have any money, so it must belong to Durand,” Louis said.

“And it must have come from the women,” Mel said. “So, where’d you and Andrew run off to this morning?”

Louis put the money back in the cheese box. “We went and saw Osborn,” he said.

“What did he say about the sword?”

“He didn’t know it was gone. But the guy has two machetes.”

Mel raised a brow. “Could they be a match?”

“They were sharp and clean. One looked big enough to kill a cow.”

Louis filled him in on the other questions he had asked Osborn, ending with the fact that Osborn claimed he had no dealings with Dickie Lyons.

“You believe him?” Mel asked.

“To hear Osborn say it, Lyons is scum. Why would he bother with a guy like Lyons?”

Mel sat up, swinging his legs to the ground. “Maybe he looked at him as someone who could provide a service.” Mel picked up a notebook and flipped back a page. “I found Barney Lassiter today.”

“The PI?”

Mel nodded. “He’s still up in the Panhandle, but we had a long talk about the surveillance he did on Carolyn Osborn. The guy has logs of everyone who came and went at the Osborn home. Guess who shows up in his records?”

“Lyons?”

“Bingo. He says Dickie’s company was hired by the Osborns to book the entertainment for Carolyn’s election-night party five years ago. He’s got a photograph of Lyons talking to Tucker Osborn out by the pool. The photograph was taken a week before Emilio Labastide disappeared.”

“That doesn’t mean anything. Like you said, Osborn probably looks at Lyons as hired help.”

“Yeah, but maybe he was hired for something else.”

Louis was quiet.

“I was thinking about what Andrew said about Carolyn Osborn and Tink Lyons having the same lover,” Mel said, flipping to a new page in his notebook. “I did some calling around this morning to find out more about them. Like Margery said, Tink’s parents died when she was in her twenties, leaving her with a small trust and an old house down here in Palm Beach. Tink rattled around in her crumbling house like one of those old Bouvier bags, until the bank managing her trust finally had to step in. She did a short stint in a psych hospital.”

Louis shook his head. “How’d she hook up with Dickie?”

“Before he got into the entertainment business, he made his first millions in construction, building places like our tsarist dacha here.” Mel gestured toward the half-built mansion beyond Reggie’s bougainvillea bushes. “Tink’s trust hired him to fix up her house. I guess he figured that while he was at it, he could fix up his reputation by marrying an heiress.”

“What about Carolyn Osborn?”

“Lassiter filled in a lot of those blanks,” Mel said. “Carolyn’s family owned orange groves and made money selling off their land to Disney back in the sixties. Carolyn got her law degree at Georgetown and did some legal work for the government. She got elected a Florida state representative in her thirties and was on the fast track, especially after she married Osborn. She won her election to the U.S. Senate pretty easily.”

Louis was quiet.

“She’s got a lot to lose,” Mel said.

Louis rose suddenly. “Why the hell would she risk it all by screwing around?”

Mel started to say something but stopped, his eyes going to the sliding glass door.

Swann was standing there. His khakis were wrinkled, his pink polo shirt stained, his jaw stubbled with whiskers. But it was his expression that worried Louis.

“You sick, Andrew?”

Swann shook his head slowly. “No. I just called my answering machine. My chief is looking for me. He wants to see me this afternoon.”

“Did he say why?” Louis asked.

Swann shook his head again. “I guess I better go home and get cleaned up.”

His eyes, red-rimmed and empty, drifted toward the ocean. Louis knew he was thinking that when he came back, he might not have a badge.

He watched Swann walk away.

And what did a cop do when he couldn’t make it even in a place like this?

Swann waited in the hall outside Chief Hewitt’s office. He wore clean khakis, a white dress shirt, and blue blazer. But this afternoon, for the first time since his job interview six years ago, he had a bright pink visitor’s badge clipped to his lapel.

The chief’s door opened, and Hewitt poked his head out. He was a small man, with trimmed salt-and-pepper hair and a narrow mustache so perfect in its shape and color that some of the officers joked that it was fake.

“Andrew, good of you to be on time,” Hewitt said. “Come on in.”

It was the largest office in the building, designed to make a tasteful but unquestioned statement about the importance of the man who occupied it. On one side of the room was a long glass conference table set with twelve high-back chairs of blue leather. The right side belonged to Chief Hewitt. The glass and chrome was standard in this place, but Hewitt had things that were uniquely his and, Swann realized, unique to this place, such as a framed photo of Hewitt and Prince Charles and a coat-rack with an array of “emergency” clothing: fresh shirt and jacket, a ceremonial dress uniform, and a tuxedo.

The walls held an arrangement of awards and certificates and the chief’s cherished display of celebrity letters from Douglas Fairbanks Jr., astronaut Edgar Mitchell, and Jimmy Buffett, plus one of his most prized pieces, a note from Donald Trump, thanking the chief for providing security during the renovation of Mar-a-Lago.

“This situation saddens me greatly, Andrew,” Hewitt said.

Swann looked back at Hewitt. His chief was standing near his desk, his hand resting on a green personnel file. The lettering on the tab was easy to read: SWANN, ANDREW T.

“It’s unpleasant for me, too, sir,” Swann said.

Hewitt pursed his lips, nodding as if he was mulling something over, but Swann suspected he was simply stalling. With a sliver of hope that he might remain employed, Swann stayed silent and tried to look relaxed.

“We do things a little differently on this island, Andrew,” Hewitt said. “I thought you knew that.”

“I do.”

“The people here expect a higher standard of service than you might see elsewhere,” Hewitt said.

“Pardon me, sir,” Swann said, “but what could be better service than fighting to save an innocent man?”

Hewitt was quiet, his fingers dancing lightly on the file.

“Determining Mr. Kent’s guilt or innocence isn’t up to you.”

“Making sure all the facts are brought to light is my job, sir,” Swann said.

“The case is not in our jurisdiction.”

“But Mr. Kent is,” Swann said. “I couldn’t stand by and watch that jerk in the Sheriff’s Office railroad him because of what he is.”

Hewitt’s eyes were steady on his. Swann didn’t look away. Somewhere from another part of the station, Swann could hear Muzak playing. Christmas carols.

“Before you came in today, I was having second thoughts about my decision to let you go,” Hewitt said. “But given this new attitude of yours, I think this is for the best.”

“May I ask exactly why I am being fired?” Swann asked.

Hewitt stared at him, as if that had been the last question he expected.

“Did I break a specific rule, sir?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” Hewitt said. “You failed to conduct yourself in a way that reflects positively on your department and your community.”

“I was trying to be a police officer,” Swann said. “I was trying to do what was right, not just what looked right.”